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Holding a Pencil, Never Missing a Basket

In December 1968, Baruch College's men's basketball team played its first game and a 1956 Baruch graduate named Burt Beagle was on the sideline as the official scorer, recording every basket, assist, steal and rebound.

Mr. Beagle missed the seventh game of the season (he was stuck in Ohio on business and he's still apologizing for it), but since then, he has not missed scoring a Baruch basketball game -- men's or women's, home or away.

On a recent Friday night, Mr. Beagle, 71, a retired accountant, worked as the official scorer for his 900th straight men's basketball game. Baruch officials said it was a collegiate record for most consecutive basketball games worked.

Mr. Beagle, then, is a sports statistician who has become a certain kind of New York sports legend -- not for his athletic prowess or his halftime pep talks, but for his acuity and perseverance with a sharp pencil and a scorer's ledger. He has scored more than 6,000 games, ranging from youth league to college. He has worked every City University tournament basketball game since the tournament started in 1970. He does Catholic school games, too -- like every football game at Mount St. Michael's High School in the Bronx since 1974.

He has, of course, never employed a computer. Indeed, no one has even suggested he use a laptop.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it," said Dima Kamenschchik, the assistant sports information director at Baruch, one of the senior colleges of the City University of New York. "The man has done 900 straight games. That's insane."

Mr. Beagle is a lifelong Bronx resident. He has lived in the same apartment in the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx since 1965, and since he does not drive, he takes mass transit to games, often to several in a day. He has been mugged several times returning from late games on the No. 2 train.

He never married and has no family to speak of. He has no hobbies, not even movies or television, he says, preferring to devote his evenings, weekends and holidays to scorekeeping for hundreds of games each year, often more than a dozen a week.

But his relationship with Baruch is the most remarkable. Until two years ago, the school never had a true home gymnasium and borrowed courts for home games. Mr. Beagle faithfully followed the team through their years of wandering through small and drafty gyms. Recently, he spent $19,000 of his own money to buy the athletic program a van.

On this Friday, Mr. Beagle was at his regular spot at the scorer's table, dressed in his usual zebra-striped official's shirt, khakis and sneakers and his oversize, bent glasses. He keeps a bunch of sharpened pencils next to his stat book, which is filled with handwritten lists of players and hieroglyphic statistical entries. The bag at his feet is overstuffed with dog-eared manila folders of team schedules and standings.

He rattled off statistics about Baruch players, including their former high schools and SAT scores. Pointing out a player for the opposing team, Lehman College, he said, "He's 26 years old and has a 6-year-old kid."

Next to Mr. Beagle is Mr. Kamenschchik, 22, who tapped away on a laptop to record game statistics for the school's computer system.

But Mr. Beagle has his own system, which is more thorough than the computer's, and he often winds up making corrections to the computer's final printouts of game stats. He keeps a separate chart for turnovers.

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"I remember driving him home after we lost a close game and saying, 'Not tonight, Burt, I don't want to hear about our turnovers or lousy shooting percentage,"' Mr. Rankis said. "So after he got out of the car, he leaned in and said, 'Thanks Ray, and by the way, this was your 200th coaching loss at Baruch."'

Mr. Beagle has been known to watch replays of games and on the rare occasions in which he has credited the wrong player with a turnover, he has corrected it on the official score sheet.

At halftime during the game against Lehman, Baruch officials presented Mr. Beagle with a commemorative basketball, emblazoned with a photo of him poring over a stat book.

As Baruch graduates stopped by to say hello, Mr. Beagle rattled off their stats. A former Baruch men's basketball coach, Hal Rosenberg, stopped by with John Steuer, a Baruch forward from 1973 to 1977.

"Burt used to have a first-half stat sheet in my hand by the time I walked into the locker room at halftime," said Mr. Rosenberg, 61, of Warwick, N.Y. "The only problem was that he'd give it to the opposing coach too. I used to say, 'Burt, do you have to be so efficient?"'

Mr. Beagle began rattling off Mr. Steuer's basketball statistics. He came out of Archbishop Molloy High School in Queens and at Baruch he averaged 5.7 points his freshman year, 19 as a sophomore, 14 as a junior and 20 as a senior. He scored more than 1,000 points and had back-to-back 30-point games. In the first half of a game against Queens College in 1977, he made 11 straight baskets without missing, still a Baruch record.

At a chaotic point in the second half, with coaches, players and fans screaming and chaos erupting on the court after a controversial play, Mr. Beagle barked out his ruling to the other scoring table officials: "Turnover No. 53, steal 14." They all nodded.

In an age when referees sometimes fall back on taped instant replays to review questionable calls, Mr. Beagle says he has trained his mind to record plays.